Nostalgia Is Power In Fight Over Carousel

By PAM BELLUCK

Published: September 18, 1995

BALDWIN, L.I., Sept. 17—
The 73-year-old man could not fit his feet into the tiny stirrups, and the dangling brass rings he once reached for had been taken down some 20 years ago.

But as he bobbed up and down on the wooden horse with the colored roses carved in its saddle, Bob Cammann's face shone and his eyes grew moist with memory.

"I have been riding this carousel since it came here, since 1939," said Mr. Cammann, a retired banker who lives in Baldwin. "Our daughter, our granddaughter and our great-granddaughter, we took them all here. And every day when I take my walk, if it's open, I ride on it. I guess this was my last ride."

For a few moments today they became children again, the grizzled men and white-haired ladies, the fathers with middle-age paunches, the watchful mothers clutching diaper bags.

Nunley's Carousel and Amusements, a fixture on Sunrise Highway in Baldwin for 56 years, closed its doors today. Soon the most entertaining thing to do on this spot may be to buy spark plugs and hubcaps from Pep Boys, the auto parts chain that has proposed to lease the land.

So today, despite the rain that put all but one ride and a few games out of commission, people streamed in. They paid homage to the whirling cylinders in the Tubs O' Fun ride, played 10-cent Skee Ball, and popped in quarters to hear the words of the strange mechanical lady called Grandma who "Predicts Your Future" from inside a glass case.

But mostly, they rode the carousel.

In recent weeks, as Nunley's prepared to close, it was caught in a whirlwind of controversy over the fate of the hand-carved, 85-year-old carousel.

The three elderly brothers who own the park wanted to sell it on the auction block, alongside the cars from the roller coaster and the windmill from the miniature golf course.

But more than 100 schoolchildren wrote letters of protest, and more than 1,000 adults signed petitions. At the 11th hour on Friday, Nassau County obtained an injunction that will keep the carousel from auction.

"The carousel is a revered landmark in Nassau County," said David Vieser, a spokesman for the Nassau County Executive, Thomas S. Gulotta, who hopes the county can buy the carousel for a public park. "It requires every possible effort to insure its future preservation."

But the action baffled and embittered the Lercari brothers, who have taken care of the carousel for about half a century. All in their 70's, the Lercaris have been trying to retire from the amusement park business for eight years; they want to sell the carousel and do not understand how the county can interfere with a private business deal.

"They're trying to steal the carousel," said Stephen Lercari, 78, the eldest of the three. "We own the thing, and we should be able to do whatever we want with it."

Built in 1910, Nunley's carousel is one of only about 125 working carousels in the country. It was a creation of the Brooklyn carousel-carving team of Sol Stein, who shaped the horses' heads and legs, and Harry Goldstein, who carved the muscular stallion bodies.

Some rival merry-go-round makers were championing prancy ponies and docile fillies, but Mr. Stein and Mr. Goldstein carved horses in the Coney Island tradition, large and robust, with wild eyes, bared teeth and high-strung expressions.

Only 3 of the 17 carousels Stein & Goldstein made are still intact. The other two are in Central Park at 65th Street and in Hartford, across the street from the Statehouse.

Nunley's carousel features two ornate green chariots, a stocky wooden lion and 41 horses, most of them a faded yellowy-white, that jump and gallop three abreast in their brightly painted saddles. The Wurlitzer organ wheezes and toots out old-time tunes, like "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "Blue Skies."

The tug-of-war over Nunley's carousel began when Stephen Lercari and his brothers Lou and Jack decided to sell the park. They had tried to sell it before, but the community defeated a 1993 plan by the King Kullen supermarket chain to build a shopping center there and display the carousel in a glass room.

"We're too old for the amusement business," Stephen Lercari said. And the business is getting tougher.

"Every delicatessen's got video games now, so that hurts us," Mr. Lercari said. "Now, we just cater to real small children, 5 or 6 years old. But everybody still wants us to stay here because their children came here and their grandchildren came here. They have all this nostalgia."

While nostalgia has been the Lercari brothers' stock in trade, it does not seem to be the stuff of their souls.

"I'm not too sentimental about this thing," Mr. Lercari said, leaning against the carousel rail under the red, yellow and green lights. No childhood love of merry-go-rounds drove the Lercaris to this field.

"It was after the war and you didn't know what you wanted to do, and we happened to get into this," said Mr. Lercari, who got a job in the 1940's as a mechanic fixing the carousels that the Nunley family ran in amusement parks in Brooklyn and Long Island. His brothers worked the parking lots. In 1964, they bought the Baldwin park from the Nunleys. "I mean, it was a living."

The Lercaris believe they will get much less for the carousel from Nassau County than they would at an auction, and they believe a public agency would not maintain it as well as a private business.

And there is someone who wants to buy it, Anthony Gentile, who runs Adventureland, an amusement park in East Farmingdale. With the backing of a bank, Mr. Gentile offered half a million dollars for the carousel, which he wants to put in a glass building in Adventureland.

The county's plan is to condemn the carousel, buy it with money from a bond issue, private contributions or both, and put it in a public park. A judge is to decide next month whether the plan is permitted under a county law that, according to Mr. Vieser, gives the authorities the right to condemn virtually any "real and personal property for lawful county purposes."

Mr. Vieser said that Nassau County's main concern was to make sure the carousel stays intact. "In an auction," he said, "there's no way of guaranteeing the highest bidder won't be someone who would chop it up and sell it in pieces."

Today, even though it looked as though the carousel would be saved, those who flocked to Nunley's acted as though they would never ride the wide-eyed ponies again.

"One last ride," said William F. Mangels, 69, whose father built the fire engine ride at Nunley's and whose grandfather once employed the makers of Nunley's carousel.

"So many lives have been on here," mused Kevin Randazzo, 18, who has been taking tickets and helping little children onto the horses for five years. "The only consolation I can think of is if, like, everything lasted forever, it would have no value. If it never came to an end, I guess it wouldn't mean so much."

Photos: The ponies at Nunley's Carousel and Amusements in Baldwin, L.I., are carved in the Coney Island tradition, robust, with wild eyes and bared teeth. (Photographs by Michael Shavel for The New York Times)